As we enter a new month, we have to announce some personnel changes to GigaScience , as we welcome Nicole Nogoy to the team as a Commissioning Editor from her base in New Zealand. It is with sadness we also have to say goodbye to our Assistant Editor Alexandra Basford, who has just left us to take up new challenges in Japan.

As a project with the aim of revolutionizing data dissemination and use, on top of promoting open-access and open-data, open-source is a key part of the open-science equation, and this week GigaScience has been at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC2012 – program here) in Long Beach.

With the summers conference season over, GigaScience are still keeping mobile, and this week Laurie is taking in “Beyond the Genome”, our BioMed Central stablemates Genome Biology and Genome Medicine meeting in Washington

So that’s ISMB over for another year. The worlds computational biologists are now sleeping off their Austrian wine and Sacher Torte hangovers on flights back home, hopefully inspired and brimming with fresh ideas for the next year. On the whole it seemed a productive and positive meeting, and whilst personal perspectives always differ depending on the tracks attended, there did seem to be several recurring themes.